What would you suggest I order at this Cajun restaurant?

I’d order Jambalaya. It’s like paella. Rice in a tomato-ish broth with all kinds of sea food (shrimp, mussels, etc.). It also has peppers, onions, sausage maybe.

Among the things not labeled spicy, I like the looks for Seafood St. Charles and Shrimp Creole.

Seafood St. Charles
A rich Creole dish containing a hint of coconut, shrimp, scallops,
crawfish & krab meat.

Shrimp Creole
Tender shrimp sautéed with tomato, peppers, onion, celery & Cajun spices.

And for $2 you can substitute jambalaya for rice, so you get to try that, too.

@jca I’d actually be cautious of Jambalaya. I knew a waitress at a restaurant who said that her restaurant used almost expired, or day old ingredients. Most of the time people didn’t get sick from eating this, but I always have gotten sick from eating Jambalaya so I never ordered it. I’m not sure if all restaurants do this, but I’ve been careful ordering it ever since I’ve heard her say that.

When I was in NOLA I liked the blacked chicken or fish.

Boiled Crawfish. Super spicy. My favorite!

Clears your sinuses out,and tastes awesome.

Shrimp creole

Blackened Chicken Diane

Thanks guys.

Kansas City isn’t on the ocean, so I’d stay away from the seafood if there were other regional specialties. http://www.midwestliving.com/food/comfort/must-try-midwest-foods/

KC is famous for meat and veg, so I’d look at the grilled entrees and pick whatever tempted me the day I was there.

You know, it’s funny. My family is from the Pacific Northwest, and my ex and I went to visit my mom. She planned a salmon fishing trip for us in Oregon.
We each caught our quota of fish (2 each) which were immediately packed in dry ice. We shipped them home two days later as luggage on our plane.
We grilled them when we got home. It was delicious.
I had had salmon when I was in the Northwest, in Seattle. The fish we cooked back in Kansas was every bit as delicious as what we had in the North West.

In other words, in today’s world, with quick freezing technology, and rapid transportation, not being near the ocean doesn’t make any difference in the sea food.

The only real difference, I think, is if you caught a fish and cooked it right then and there. Otherwise, they go through the same process of getting seafood to grocery stores in Washington State as they do getting them to stores in Kansas.

I explained all this logic to my mom at the time and she said, “You just RUINED it!” :(

To me it’s like saying, “Don’t order a Kansas City strip in New York because the cow it came from was raised so far away.”

It’s usually perfectly safe. Around here fresh seafood is flown in daily by a couple of businesses and sold to the restaurants. Pretty common in most big cities.

Exactly @ARE_you_kidding_me.

Shrimp etouffee is pretty mild. You can also ask the waitperson for recommendations.

@ARE_you_kidding_me , common is precisely how I think of it.

I can have flown-in fish/seafood anywhere.

I can only get the best local foods – prepared with local ingredients – where they are local. I’m a believer in the difference terroir can make. Took me a while to come around to it, but I get it now. Having a meal of vegetables grown locally, with meats raised locally, with beverages made of local ingredients – it does taste different , and better, when there is terroir match. It’s a cousin of locavore – which is another thing I try to do when I’m eating somewhere different. I go to 100 mile markets when possible.

I literally have had fresher seafood here in Tennessee than I did at many places right on the coast. It helps that I know where to go too.

The whole idea of jambalaya started as a way to use ingredients up.

The Legend of the Origin of “Jambalaya”

Long ago, before the invention of the automobile, the bayou country in Louisiana was really back country, and inns and roadhouses seemed to occur approximately one day’s journey apart. One evening a traveller happened into one of these establishments, looking for a place to spend the night. The chef, the story goes, was cleaning the kitchen. The traveller was hungry, so the innkeeper shouted back to the kitchen, “Jean! Balaia!” which, I’ve heard, is loosely translated to mean, “Jean, mix something up!”...

At least that’s the story I heard when I was down there.

Anybody that thinks that they are having fine fresh seafood 500 miles or more inland are sorely missing out or mislead. I know there are Jellies like me who have had seafood that was never flash frozen and was served on a plate at a dock side restaurant within hours of being hauled out of the ocean and know the gustatorial difference of eating seafood fresh out of the ocean within hours of it’s harvest. No comparison and why I plan on retiring on the ocean.

@Cruiser this is not different. It’s literally hours between catch and plate.

A favourite memory of an amazing meal in the US was at a tiny restaurant in South Carolina about 20 years ago. After ordering the seafood lunch special, the waitress came back to apologize that one of the ingredients would not be local. Oh? where is it from? oh, nothing good off our dock so we had to go <she points> there – the dock off the end of the driveway about 20 yards away. That’s non-local :) the way I like it.

@Cruiser I said that Kansas gets their grocery store seafood products in the same way, and at about the time as, say, Seattle grocery stores get their seafood. I also said, “The only difference would be eating sea food that had just been caught.”

And by your reasoning, no one in Florida can possibly know the difference between a KC Strip, from beef raised in Kansas, from a grocery store, and a steak cooked within hours of the slaughter.

Plus, 99.99999% of the time people do not eat fish caught just hours earlier. Any restaurant you go to, virtually anywhere, any fish they eat has been caught, and stored, the same way fish that has made it’s way to Kansas.

You ever eat tilapia fish, @Cruiser? They are native to Africa and the Middle East.

@Dutchess_III tilapia are farmed across the country in the US.

Much tilapia is farmed in Asia.

@Dutchess_III has a good point. Often I see a Sysco truck making deliveries at restaurants, and who knows what the restaurant orders? Anything from coffee to steak to fish to desserts.

I understand restaurants striving for ideological purity for an audience that enjoys that and can afford it. I live in an area rife with them.

But daily worrying whether you have the most perfect traditional organic botanically-pure hyper-local hand-raised food is going to take years off your life compared to relaxing a little and enjoying what the average people around you like for the office holiday party.

red beans and sausage over rice, spiced steamed shrinp, jambalaya, gumbo, okra creole, cajun chicken with pasta, crawfish…..................any of these (well, actually I don’t eat crawfish)

@Call_Me_Jay It’s smart to know where your seafood comes from. Much of it now comes from Viet Nam. Read about how Basa and Swai are raised over there. IT MATTERS. These are being served more and more in restaurants as fried fish, white fish, etc. And stews and gumbos too. I ask about everything. I’m a horrible restaurant customer. I live on the Gulf and love seafood and Cajun food, but I’m particular.

@Call_Me_Jay , that’s the joy of going to local restaurants that serve local specialties. Super easy to try things the way they were intended. Office holiday party food – you can have (or skip ) it anytime.

Local honey drizzled on local cheese, with a local apple orchard cider. Easy, delicious and amazing. Nachos with Bud at a chain restaurant. Tastyish but rarely amazing.
(same price for both)

@ARE_you_kidding_me I know they’re farmed across the country. But they are native to Africa and the middle east.

FWIW, I ate Cajun crab cake and shrimp Diane with a Cajun bloody Mary (...are there any indigestible named after men?) It was very, very good. However, it probably wasn’t the best idea for breakfast (at noon) on a tummy suffering from a hang over. >_<.